Reverse logistics can be thought of as the process by which goods and materials are returned to a retailer and then flow backwards through the supply chain for the purpose of recapturing value and/or proper disposal. Reverse logistics involves physically transporting and disposing of returned goods, issuing correct invoices to the product vendor and correctly crediting the product retailer stores for the returned goods. Because large retailers may sell many different products in many different stores that are purchased from many different vendors, a prodigious amount of information about returned goods is captured and generated in the reverse logistics process. Retailers are thus interested in receiving information from the reverse logistic process that will be useful in reducing the costs associated with returned goods.
Systems and methods for analyzing returned goods information for a single consumer-store-vendor reverse supply chain have been known. A disadvantage of such known systems and methods is that they do not provide returned goods information for multiple retailers having multiple stores selling multiple products purchased from multiple vendors. Thus, a need exists for a system and method for efficiently storing and displaying returned goods information for multiple retailers having multiple stores that sell multiple products supplied by multiple vendors.